Back to David's theory of evolution: God's error corrections (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, September 12, 2020, 18:47 (1315 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I have inadvertently exposed your underlying bias. I remember your championship of catastrophe theories. You tend to always emphasize the dark side of reality. Errors are rare when the whole picture is analyzed. Note today's comment on DNA translation and error controls and your bleak outlook below:

dhw: You focused on disease-causing errors, and twisted yourself in knots by saying God didn’t care about them and yet provided backups, though sometimes these didn’t work and he left it to us to correct what he couldn’t correct. All I have done is (a) try to unravel your tangled web of thought and (b) offer an alternative interpretation of the “errors”. We are completely united in our wonderment at the miracle of life and all the things that work.

Your history of my stream of consciousness ignores present thought, which is all that counts.

DAVID: You interpreted my comments as denigration, showing your biased view.

dhw: ... My alternative, however, proposes a God who knows what he wants and designs it as he wants it, i.e. giving cells the freedom to be nice or nasty, and by extension to design their own ways of survival, thereby leading to the supercolossal variety of life forms and natural wonders that make up the history of our wonderful world. And no “errors” or futile attempts to control them. Just a theory, and it’s not “bleak”. It’s simply a different interpretation of your God’s capabilities and intentions.

Yes it is, your usual concept of God who is not in control and lets things fester on their own. My God is in total control of history

DAVID: Wonderful example of not understanding or appreciating the system God gave us in living organisms. It is a distorted version of how God handled things as I see Him, full of purpose and direction.

dhw: It’s not a distortion of any kind. It’s DIFFERENT from the way you see things, but it is also full of purpose and direction – only it’s a different purpose and direction from those which you cling to and which lead you into the confusion I have summarized above.

DAVID: You have Him letting things dash about in all directions.

dhw: I have him calmly and deliberately inventing a system which results in cells “dashing about in all directions” (though hardly dashing, since the process covered billions of years) to create the huge variety of life forms and natural wonders that make up life’s history. It is you who have HIM dashing about in all directions, designing every single life form, lifestyle, natural wonder, giving courses in nest-building and operating on the brains of sleeping Moroccans. >

DAVID (under “Genome complexity"): If this looks highly complex, it is. Only design can create this degree of controls resulting in accurate translation and transcription. Miraculous, yet we know mistakes can happen. It depends upon your viewpoint as to how to conceive of this. Paul Davies calls life a miracle in his book about life. But some wail over the mistakes in molecular function as though they are a huge disaster and present an impotent God. It all depends on the real recognition that life functions perfectly well almost all the time. I have presented the problem of errors to demonstrate a more complete picture of the problems attendant with this mechanism of life.

dhw: It is you who brought up the subject of disease-causing errors and set out to explain them, and yes, I would say they are a huge disaster, but that doesn’t mean I do not also wonder at the miracle of life. As above, your method of explaining them swung from your God not caring to your God providing backups which don’t always work and leaving it to humans to do the correcting, and finally to your estimate that they only constitute 0.000001% of the system so we shouldn’t think about them. I certainly wouldn’t describe your God as impotent, but if he created a system which produced errors he couldn’t control, though he really wanted to control them, I don’t see how you can avoid the conclusion that this entails a degree of incompetence. You say he couldn’t have done it otherwise. I say maybe he didn’t WANT to do it otherwise. Which of these theories is more respectful of your God’s powers?

It is not a matter of respect. The bold fits my analysis of the biochemistry of life. From yesterdays entry: "I think a more complex system of molecular controls using more chaperoning molecules would have been too cumbersome resulting in reactions that were too slow for the high speed results required in life." That concept is crucial to my conclusions. Your reaction is the same as I brought out earlier. You see the bad side as the colored sentence indicates. I see the good side of what God created. Reviewing my stream of consciousness is beside the point of current discussion. Try sticking to where we are now. This problem of errors had to be covered for completeness. Why did you say I proposed "we shouldn't think about them". That was never my intent in bringing up the entire subject, which has you still in total confusion and bias about God's abilities.